


By Any Other Name

by ThePeaPodinthePumpkinPie



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2016-10-22
Packaged: 2018-08-23 21:50:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8344141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThePeaPodinthePumpkinPie/pseuds/ThePeaPodinthePumpkinPie
Summary: Petunia and Vernon act like actual adults in the face of the Potters and magic.  This has many repercussions that will eventually ripple throughout the wizarding world.





	1. Chapter 1

1.

Petunia

I kept in contact with my sister mostly through letters. The letters would be sent to the leader of the movement, the head of the Order of the Phoenix, Albus Dumbledore. Then he would send the letters in turn by owl to me. I would write a letter and send it back to Dumbledore. It was an old-fashioned way of doing things, but the only way that was safe.

I had hated my sister until I was about nineteen. By that time I was dating Vernon Dursley. He was a junior executive at a company and I was a secretary. I had hated my sister for many reasons I managed to justify to myself, reasons that don’t bear mentioning here, because the real reason I hated my sister was envy. My sister was beautiful, and my sister was magical, and our parents paid much more attention to my sister growing up. In retrospect, I think it was because as Muggles, or non magical people, they had to work harder to understand Lily. But I didn’t really register that at the time.

I talked this all out with my therapist. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When I was nineteen, our parents died and my sister got married in the same year. She was fresh out of school. It was with a boy she’d met at school, James Potter. It was plain the world she had decided to marry into. His family had been wizards (and witches, Lily would have reminded me) for centuries. She was head over heels for him. He was one of those devil may care sorts of people. He had lots of money and he rode a motorcycle and had cool hair. Vernon wasn’t nearly as glamorous, though he was a good deal stabler, and because of this I think internally rolled my eyes at least twice.

I was irrationally upset by the fact that Lily was marrying into a wizarding family, considering how expected it was. Fresh from grief at the death of our parents, I called my sister - they have what’s called technomagic, technology in both worlds - and I screamed at her over the telephone. I told her she was betraying our parents by marrying James. I said horrible things. She hung up on me. Vernon overheard and insisted, quite alarmed, that I go talk to someone.

“I love you, but what you just did borders on insane,” were his exact words. I yelled at him too, and he just stood there and looked at me, and eventually I sat down and started crying.

So I went to talk to someone. It was someone Albus Dumbledore, of all people, recommended, someone who specialized in both worlds. It was all very cliche, childhood issues of abandonment and all that. I talked about being passed over despite being the older sister. I talked about our parents. I talked about the feeling of losing Lily to a world she obviously found superior to mine. I talked about wishing I were a beautiful witch like Lily. I talked about things I’d forgotten I was still holding onto.

And one of the things my therapist demanded, predictably, was that I make contact again with Lily and apologize. “None of this is actually her fault,” my therapist pointed out to me, as gently as she could. “And it will be therapeutic for you.”

I told her it most certainly would not be therapeutic for me, that Lily was a freak, and she talked to me about it over and over again until I caved. She asked me what made Lily so freakish, what made magic so freakish. And I had no answer. Eventually she got me to consider the possibility that I was simply very angry with my sister over things she could never have controlled.

And again and again, she brought up the possibility of reconciliation.

So I bit the bullet, so to speak, and called Lily. I admitted to her that I’d been seeing a therapist, and that I had called to apologize for yelling at her. “And… for… everything else,” I finished awkwardly. “For all of it.”

To my surprise, she apologized too. “I never stopped being sorry you weren’t a witch,” she admitted. It was a very hard thing to swallow, the idea that your sister was perhaps more forgiving than you were.

So we started talking, and she caught me up on everything that had been going on with her. I caught her up on everything that had been going on with me. She told me about the wizarding world, and I in turn relayed what she had told me to Vernon. Vernon had been hesitant of the wizarding world at first, but he came to see the light. In his own words, “They have families and technologies and governments and career paths just like we do. They’re not really so different, after all.”

We went to Lily and James’s wedding, and James and Lily went to ours. We kept in contact with them right through into the hardest part of the war. Lily didn’t tell me as much anymore. She told me she was pregnant, she told me she was a Healer and James was a duelist in the war effort for a while, she told me she and James had become political targets and had to go into hiding, and after that it was all letters. I could not even be there for her at the birth of her son.

Vernon and I were extremely worried. There was the fact that this could potentially affect us, of course - the people James and Lily were fighting had targeted Muggles. And that was chilling. But more than anything, we were worried for our relatives. Even we didn’t know where they were.

Still, Lily and I kept in contact through letters - I became pregnant the same year she did; by this time, Vernon had risen to the head of his firm and I had become a housewife - and we talked about names for our sons. I was going to call mine Dudley. Lily and James’s original name idea for their son was Harry James, which I scuffled immediately.

“It’s such a commonplace name,” I bemoaned in one of my letters. “And it’s not even a whole name! It’s two first names stuck together!” I offered some better names for her consideration. Not fanciful names, necessarily, but different names. Ones you didn’t hear often.

They chose a better name in the end. Finn. They were going to call their son Finn. Finn Roan Potter, in the name of completeness. His birth date was July 31, only a couple of months after the birth of my own son Dudley. 

We shared excitement and worry as new mothers, but we couldn’t see each other. We couldn’t be there for each other, really.

Still, I was glad I’d made up with Lily in the end. Flash forward a year. Dudley and Finn were both one year old. It was early November, very cold out. I opened the front door that morning, and I found a baby boy lying there swaddled on the doorstep, a letter tucked inside his blankets. 

I shrieked and started shouting about idiots who left babies out in the cold. Dudley in his high chair began wailing. The little dark-haired boy abandoned on the doorstep also began wailing. Vernon thundered down the stairs with his tie half undone, and stopped and stared. 

“Get him inside,” he said immediately, rushing for the boy, and at the same time we brought him in out of the cold and set him on the kitchen table. I’ll give him this, he was still healthy, with a good set of lungs on him. We opened the letter he came with, and that was when we got the news.

My sister was dead.

My sister and her husband were dead, and this was Finn. We were told of his miraculous survival, the scar on his forehead, and the end of the war. We were told we were his only living relatives, and that he had to stay with us. Dumbledore wrote the letter himself. “I wish for him to have as normal and happy a childhood as possible. I wish for you to raise him as if he were your own son,” Dumbledore finished. “Please allow him this letter when is old enough to read it.”

I stared down at the baby boy. I had sat down, my hand over my mouth; I was numb, but somehow breathless, as though I had just been hit very hard. Finn stopped wailing, and his eyes opened. The dark hair was all his father, but the almond-shaped bright green eyes - those were Lily’s. 

“He is not getting anywhere near this letter,” was the first thing that came out of my mouth, staring at him.

“Petunia -” Vernon began, obviously pained.

“No!” I stood, shrieking, and the wailing began again; I ignored it. “Do you know what they did?! They killed my sister! Magic killed my sister! If she weren’t a witch, she would still be alive!”

I had to believe this. I could not stop war or politics, but magic. Magic, I had to believe I could stop. 

“And they are not getting anywhere near her son,” I continued darkly. “He is going to be raised, but he is going to be raised the way I want him to be. No magic. I’ll have none of it. He will be a normal boy,” I said fiercely, pointing at him, my eyes burning. “And that is the way it will happen.”

“Okay. Okay,” said Vernon soothingly, standing. He hugged me, and I began crying. “... What will we do?” he said, his chin on my head, after a while. “Deny him imagination, deny him -?”

“No, no, magic doesn’t work like that,” I said irritably. “We both know it by now. He must voluntarily turn away from his magic. And the only way he will do that is if he is loyal to a loving and disciplined Muggle home. If we raise and treat him and Dudley both the same, both equally - if we treat them both like ordinary boys - if we crush his magical inclinations early on - he will be loyal to us. And when we eventually tell him to turn away from his magical roots… he will.”

I thought I could stop it. I thought I could control him. Finn Potter.

I was naive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is set in the 21st century.
> 
> This story will be told in first person through varying points of view. Obviously, this first chapter was from the perspective of Petunia Dursley.
> 
> From here on out for a good while, the point of view will be Finn's. He will reflect on different childhood memories in short little vignettes, in no particular chronological order. (This was also meant to be a vignette of sorts - just a little introduction.) This will all lead up to an eventual merging with canon.


	2. Chapter 2

2.

Finn

I suppose I should start with my earliest childhood memory.

My cousin Dudley, a large blond, blue-eyed boy, is inside watching television, shoving snacks into his mouth with his eyes on the screen. We couldn’t have been more than four or five. I didn’t find the television very interesting before I was old enough to understand it, so I wandered down the stairs and past Dudley in the living room, past Aunt Petunia in the kitchen, out the door into the back garden.

I liked exploring, getting myself dirty. I had a quiet, impulsive sort of curiosity - it was why there were childproof locks on all the cupboard doors that led to things which could kill me. I was always looking for new things, new pieces of childlike information.

I went up to the shed door and tried that - no good. Locked. It was too bad, because there were lots of things to climb over and some interesting-looking spiders in there. 

So I went up to the big oak tree by the hedge and looked up into the leafy branches, the sunlight gleaming through them. There was a bird up there with a nest. It was a pretty blue color. I grabbed a knot in the tree, placing my foothold on a piece of bark. Once I thought I had a pretty sure grip, I started climbing up toward the bird.

Before I’d gotten more than halfway up, there was a scream and I looked around and fell over painfully onto my bottom on the ground. I sat there in surprise.

“Finn Roan Potter, what on earth are you doing?!” my aunt, who had seen me from the kitchen window and shrieked, called as she ran out to meet me. I heard my full name and that was how I knew I was in trouble.

My Aunt Petunia was a thin blonde woman, her hair up in a shiny coiffe and her whole body tall and rangy and bony, her teeth protruding and crooked and her face drawn and thin with high cheekbones. She wore a peach dress that day and it had a white flower pattern. Her makeup was always pristine and she always smelled like expensive perfume. My aunt loved femininity, she liked classical literature and the ballet. That kind of thing. Her blue eyes were usually sharp and glaring, but there was concern hidden within them. 

Dudley got his largeness from his father, my Uncle Vernon, a vast-bellied, rosy-cheeked man with a large, fluffy black mustache, a receding hairline, and dark eyes. A rugby player gone to seed. He was intelligent, reasonable, rational, stable; he made good money and he always wore a tie - in other words, he had everything my aunt prized.

“I wanted to see the bird,” I said now, looking up at her, pointing.

She stared up at the bird within the branches, and then glared down at me again. “Are you insane? That’s far too high for you to climb!”

“Is not.” I gave a little frown at the idea of not being able to do something. “Next time, I’m sure I can get it.” I stood up and walked toward the tree, and my aunt grabbed me in her arms and hoisted me up. 

“There will not be a next time,” she snapped. “Now look at you! You’re filthy! You are covered in dirt!”

“I’m always covered in dirt,” I muttered, scowling. (I always saw it as scowling, not pouting.)

“I hadn’t noticed,” said my aunt flatly, sarcastic. “Now come inside, let’s get you cleaned up.” And all business, she bustled me away into the house.

I have countless memories like these. I was always exploring, getting in trouble and getting dirty. And I was always being scolded and cleaned up by my aunt later. Dudley used to laugh at me.

“One day you’ll get in real trouble and then I don’t know what they’ll do,” he prophesied. "They've already done it all."

-

I had a lot of friends growing up, mostly boys. I never had one singular close best friend, but I had many friends. For some reason, people liked me. I think it was because I was so quiet and comfortable with myself. “Different,” people called me, but different was not always a bad thing, I learned. My aunt, determined for us to be social, set me and Dudley up on play dates with basically every boy who had ever existed in our neighborhood since the dawn of time, and we each formed our own circle of friends.

I was very good friends with three boys, Samuel, Harkin, and Andrew. Samuel was a super confident boy with a love for comic books, an interesting combination. Harkin was a true eccentric, an original, who made strange collages and gathered animal bones. Andrew was one of the kindest people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting; even as a child he often did charity work with his mother, a friend of my aunt’s.

I had the luxury of picking the people I let closest to me, and I chose those three because I liked them. They were good people, but more than that they were interesting, something I craved.

We hung out all the time, the four of us. I preferred going outside and experiencing the world, even as my cousin and his rowdy group of friends fell into a lifetime love for video games. So me, Samuel, Harkin, and Andrew would go bicycling or swimming together, or we would go get ice cream.

Once Samuel’s Dad took us all out camping. He drove us out there to a forest with a river nearby, and we set up tents by the river, listening to it rush beside us. Samuel’s Dad took us hiking up in the mountains, which was fascinating - I had never seen so much untouched nature before. Later that night, Samuel’s Dad told scary stories around the fire, and we roasted smores. He taught us how to set them on fire and then blow the fire out, getting an instant caramelized effect.

Me and my friends shared a tent with an open, netted top. That night we lay in our sleeping bags, staring up at the stars.

“You can’t see these in the city,” I said. “I don’t know any of the constellations.”

“Isn’t it weird how we do that?” Samuel commented. “Make shapes out of suns thousands of lightyears away from each other?” Samuel read a lot about science. He thought about things like that.

“Cave people must have gotten bored,” said Harkin. “What else was there to do?”

“They had drawing on walls with sticks! They weren’t bored!” said Samuel.

“Yeah, but really, there’s only so many stick figures you can make, you know?” I said in dry amusement, egging on the conversation.

“But they had to hunt and pick berries and shi -” Andrew looked around. He’d been about to swear, but Samuel’s Dad was close by in the other tent. “And stuff. Right?”

“True, I guess,” Samuel admitted.

Then Harkin started pretending he was a caveman and set us all laughing. Samuel’s Dad finally scolded us gently from the next tent over. I think about that memory sometimes - of feeling completely happy and safe.

-

My aunt’s kitchen was where all the real magic happened.

It was always spotless. Aunt Petunia was almost obsessively clean. It was why she didn’t like animals. Stiff and straight-backed in the kitchen, she would pride herself on making the most interesting and delectable feasts, always beautiful visually to behold.

Gourmet meals full of fruits and vegetables and steak, omelettes, and magnificent puddings. All were there for our feasting. I loved her big, hearty meat and potato dinners - unlike my cousin, I was not a picky eater. And I had a great secret weakness for chocolate, especially treacle and fudge. Dudley and I went on many cookie jar thievery missions together when we were little. My aunt knew about this, and so on birthdays and special occasions, Ghirardelli chocolates and chocolate-related desserts were always on the menu.

The kitchen was a wide, gleaming space, one half the kitchen and one half the dining room, both of good size. The house I grew up in was a two story boxy sort of suburban building, with lots of space inside and a flower garden out front that Aunt Petunia personally took care of, a surrounding garden wall and a white picket front gate with hedgerows. The inside was always neat and clean - childish messes never allowed - and filled with nice furniture, covered in a soothing white color scheme. The living room had a sofa, armchairs, a nice television, and a huge red-brick fireplace with a gleaming mantel piece. The staircase was sweeping rustic wood, leading down to the front hall. There were four bedrooms and two bathrooms, the fourth bedroom being a guest room. Cupboards and closets folded out from everywhere, one of the reasons my aunt and uncle, ever economical, had bought the house.

Our neighborhood was usually safe to play outside in. We lived in a suburb outside of Surrey city called Little Whinging, and it was one of those places with lots of green front lawns and people sunbathing in front of rows of houses that all looked the same. The driveways were sweeping, there were cul de sacs, and the streets were always nicely paved.

My uncle had a nine-to-five corporate job in the city selling drills. My aunt was a housewife, and she was always home. They had very traditional gender roles - she cooked and cleaned, he did all the fix-it work. And they seemed to be happy that way.

I had an idyllic childhood, a safe and happy one. I grew up with a sort of inner security, a comfort in myself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is far from the last chapter on Finn's childhood. I'm breaking it up into sections. I'll let you know when we've come to the last chapter.


	3. Chapter 3

3.

One summer we took a holiday to the seaside.

We drove for hours and hours, me and Dudley bickering, kicking and shoving each other, in the back seat. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia kept scolding us, to little effect. By the time we all got out of the car, our patience had been tried very much, but the minute the salty sea air whispered against my face and lifted my messy dark hair back, it all dissolved.

The seaside was amazing. Lovely dark green, rocky cliffs looked out over a sandy white beach littered with people. Colorful umbrellas and beach towels could be spotted amidst the fray. Beyond them, the bluish sea gleamed in the sunlight, rippling. Wind washed against the cliffs and blasted into my face. Again, I tasted salt, like in sea salt decorated chocolate.

Aunt Petunia slathered me and Dudley with sunscreen and then we picked our way down the stairs cut through the cliff and onto the beach. The sand was warm and conformed to our feet, like some bizarre version of snow. Dudley and I ran, stumbling clumsily, across the sand to where the sea was crashing against the shore, immediately getting soaked.

“Boys! Vernon, what if they drown?” said my aunt worriedly from the beach. 

My uncle chuckled. “They’ll be fine, Petunia.”

Dripping and lagged with water, me and Dudley eventually found our way back to the beach blanket, umbrella, and cooler. Uncle Vernon was pretending to tan, his big belly like a skin-colored lump protruding from the towel, and my aunt was reading from underneath the umbrella. Dudley and I grabbed snacks and juice, and then had some fun building a sand castle on top of Uncle Vernon, who pretended not to notice our snickering. Then we both went off in different directions.

There were a series of stony caves and a shallow lagoon built into one part of the beach, and crowds of adventurous children and teenagers were heading over there, climbing along the cliffs into the caves and lagoon. Squeals of laughter could be heard from within, screams and shrieks. Dudley joined an expedition heading in that direction. 

“You coming, Finn?” He cocked his head, puzzled. “I thought you liked all that exploration stuff.”

I shook my head. “Too many people. Don’t worry about me, Dud. There are lots of interesting things at the beach.”

“Oh, Duddy, do be careful!” I heard Aunt Petunia call as I ventured off along the sand. I walked along the shoreline for a while, picking up and collecting seashells, examining different ones, putting them into my pockets. Then I found the tidepools and climbed about in there, my feet brushing up against squishy feelings and prickly coral in the light layer of water. I looked with interest at each tiny, individual thing within the tidepools.

Eventually, I climbed up through the sand, back up the stairs, so that I was walking along the cliffside, in the green sea grass. I peered curiously over the edge. It was a long, stiff drop. Kind of exciting. My stomach did a little loop.

“Have a deathwish, speaker?”

I looked around - there was nobody there.

“Down here,” said the hissing, female voice irritably. I looked down - a tiny, bottle green snake by my feet had crept up unnoticed through the grass, opened its mouth… and spoken. 

I felt a flare of excitement. I had already realized I could do curious things and begun to control that power - something I’ll devote a different section to - and this had to be one of those curiosities. One of those unexplainable happenings. A manifestation of the powers inside me.

I squatted down next to the snake. “What’s your name?”

“Fragella.”

“Do you talk to many people?”

Fragella shook her head. “I’ve heard rumors of speakers - those who can speak to snakes and serpents. But they’re said to be rare. The only one I’ve ever met is you.”

I pondered this thoughtfully.

“What is your name?” Fragella asked.

“Finn,” I said. “Like on a dolphin.”

Fragella hissed out a laugh. She seemed to find this funny. “Have a nice day, Speaker Finn,” she whispered, swishing away through the grass.

“Wait!” I called after her. “How did you know I was a speaker?”

“We always know,” Fragella called lightly, a sly smile in her voice, and she continued on her way.

I was still even quieter than usual when I met up with my family at the end of the day. “Is something wrong?” Dudley asked curiously.

“Oh, no,” I lied, smiling. “Nothing.”


End file.
